“Won’t try because I know I can’t succeed. Give it up, Wad. I won’t interfere with you. I’ll even help with whatever wind can do. Except assassination. But you want to capsize some of Drabway’s ships? I can do that. Bring some sand into the city from the desert? My gig, exactly. But nothing that might kill anybody.”

“Capsizing ships might kill people,” said Wad. “And people die in sandstorms all the time.”

“OK then,” said Ced. “I won’t do those things either. You keep lightening my load. You’re all heart.”

“Aren’t you even curious?” asked Wad.

“Yes! I’m amazingly curious! But I’m not curious about the things you care about, Wad. I’m not from here. I’m not from the time you’re from. You were inside that tree for fifteen hundred years, and you’ve been back to Mittlegard at least once. But you’ve never even asked me about cars, airplanes, the trips to the moon, nuclear energy, how stars form and collapse and explode—it’s incredible to me how much you aren’t interested in.”

“I can’t do anything about those things,” said Wad. “And if you give it a moment’s thought, you’ll see that a gatemage has no reason to be curious about transportation.”

Ced laughed. “I suppose not. You claim to care about the drowthers, but did you ever think of setting up a public gate just to get people from downtown to the suburbs? Like a magic railroad, a subway that doesn’t need any tunnels. You just go through the turnstile and you’re in the parking lot forty miles or a thousand miles away, where you left your car.”

Wad could only shake his head. “There are billions of people. How many gates do you think I could make?”

“How many freeways and subways and airports have we built? There are fewer than two thousand commercial airports on Earth. You had way more gates than that. You could have established a handful of hubs, and people could just jostle their way through to their destinations. You don’t have to load them into planes. No air traffic control. Clean. No fuel costs. No crashes. A farmer with a cart could get his produce to a market a thousand miles away without a middleman. And everybody who travels that way arrives completely healed! You could have been such a blessing to the world, and I bet it never crossed your mind.”

“Airplanes are good enough,” said Wad. “And I have other things on my mind.”